Sell-by date, er, I mean use-by date.

Your fresh groceries are safe in Sainsbury's hands! They are throwing all that HR can handle at training, assuring that their grocery online shoppers are trained to pick the longest date. They actually (I was going to say "in reality, they" but what HR person lives in reality?) mean "pickers" but let's not split hairs here. This, after all, is the wild and wacky world of HR!

The difference between a "shopper" and a "picker" must pose a terrible strain on the average HR person's comprehension of the world of retail groceries when factoring in the almost Nobel Prize-winning concept that shoppers do in fact become pickers when shopping!

This training must have tapped the deepest recesses of HR at Sainsbury's. The difference between "sell by" and "use by" dates must be one of life's mind-warping quandaries that shakes the deepest neurological nooks and crannies of even the most mentally astute HR director and his assistant, usually named Chardonnay, which is a strange name for a man, but hey, Eddie Izzard has rewritten the first name manual.

But, if you will, picture the actual full day's training (in typical HR fashion, 4 minutes of training dragged out to fill the two days the HR directorate allotted to the training session).

VOPHRD (Vastly Overpaid HR Director): "Right guys*, let's examine dates on packages"
(* hip use of the term "guys" to appeal to the modern internet-age worker)
HSL (Homer Simpson Lookalike): "Duh! Errr I thought dates came IN trays from the Middle East"
VOPHRD: (Laughing extremely patronisingly) "Thank you Tarquin.

"Now, date training (giving Tarquin an icy "Vin Diesel tied up by the baddies and connected to a car battery"-type stare). Now, please look at the two packets of celery in front of you.

"The first one has the date 23rd June, the second, 26th June. Because 26 is greater than 23, it means the one marked 26th June is the freshest. However, don't be fooled.

"If you were to come across a packet with 2nd July on, just because it is a "2" (in this case July) it does not mean it is less fresh than one marked 26 (in our case June).

If there is any doubt, please consult a calendar to see the order in which months appear during the year.

Thank you. Now pass around the cyanoacrylate glue, please. We're going to have a bonding session. Or, we have ropes and flagellation equipment and can have a bondage session instead, if you prefer."